Philip Blond is a British political thinker and writer best known for developing the "Red Tory" argument, an attempt to reconstruct conservatism around community, association, and the dispersal of economic and political power. Originally a theology lecturer, he founded the think tank ResPublica and became a prominent public intellectual through his book Red Tory, which argued that both the post-war social-democratic state and the market liberalism of the Thatcher era had corroded the intermediate institutions—families, neighbourhoods, guilds, cooperatives, local associations—on which a healthy society depends. In his account, an alliance between big government and big business hollowed out civil society, leaving individuals isolated and dependent, and he called for a politics that would rebuild these mediating bodies.
Blond's thought draws on a communitarian and distributist tradition, with intellectual debts to Catholic social teaching, English pluralist and cooperative thinking, and the theological movement known as Radical Orthodoxy associated with John Milbank. He is critical of what he sees as an atomizing liberalism common to both left and right, and instead champions the wider distribution of assets, ownership, and responsibility—favouring mutuals, cooperatives, and civic institutions over both state provision and unfettered corporate power. This places him within a broader current of "post-liberal" thought that questions the individualist premises shared across the mainstream political spectrum.
His ideas gained particular attention through their perceived influence on David Cameron's "Big Society" agenda, which emphasized voluntary action, local empowerment, and a smaller but more enabling state. Blond became a widely discussed commentator on the future of the centre-right, arguing that conservatism could recover a genuinely social character rather than serving as a vehicle for market economics. Critics questioned whether the Red Tory vision could be translated into concrete policy, or whether it risked providing rhetorical cover for spending reductions, while others saw it as a serious effort to renew conservative philosophy after the exhaustion of Thatcherism.
Blond's significance lies less in a settled body of policy than in reframing debate: he helped popularize the idea that questions of community, ownership, and belonging cut across the conventional left–right divide, and he remains associated with efforts to articulate a communitarian, tradition-conscious conservatism attentive to inequality and social fragmentation.